Several dozen people were already there, perfectly ordinary-looking men and women, better dressed perhaps than the average. The chapel was a nonsectarian one which managed to combine a number of decorative influences with a blandness quite remarkable in its success at not really representing anything while suggesting, at the same time, everything. The presence of a dead body, a man carefully painted and wearing a blue serge suit, gently smiling in an ebony casket behind a bank of flowers at the chapel’s end, did not detract as much as one might have supposed from the occasion’s importance. After the first uneasiness, it was quite possible to accept the anonymous dead man as a part of the décor. There was even, in later years, an attempt made by a group of Cavite enthusiasts to insist upon the presence of an embalmed corpse at every service but fortunately the more practical elements among the Cavites prevailed, though not without an ugly quarrel and harsh words. John Cave’s entrance followed our own by a few minutes and it is with difficulty that I recall what it was that I felt on seeing him for the first time. Though my recollections are well-known to all (at least they _were_ well-known, although now I am less certain, having seen Butler’s Testament so strangely altered), I must record here that I cannot, after so many years, so much history, recall in any emotional detail my first reaction to this man who was to be the world’s, as well as my own, peculiar nemesis. But, concentrating fiercely, emptying my mind of later knowledge, I can still see him as he walked down the aisle of the chapel, a small man who moved with some grace. He was younger than I’d expected or, rather, younger-looking, with short straight hair, light brown in color, a lean regular face which would not have been noticed in a crowd unless one had got close enough to see the expression of the eyes: the large diver eyes with black lashes like a thick line drawn on the pale skin, focusing attention to them, to the congenitally small pupils which glittered like the points of black needles, betraying the will and the ambition which the impassive, gentle face belied ... but I am speaking with future knowledge now: I did not that evening think of ambition or will in terms of John Cave. I was merely curious, intrigued by the situation, by the intensity of Iris, by the serene corpse behind the banks of hothouse flowers, by the thirty or forty men and women who sat close to the front of the chapel, listening intently to Cave as he talked.